The challenges of illness help Roxanne Black treasure little things most people ignore, and she discusses them with simple -- albeit blunt -- elegance. For example: "I can pee because my kidneys function."

Every time her body works the way it's supposed to: "I feel like throwing a party," says Black, 36, an appreciative smile spreading across her face. Then she mentions another little thing she's grateful for: "I can walk from here to there without pain."

Black has five kidneys -- two that function, three that don't. After her own, "native" ones failed about 15 years ago, her older sister donated one of hers. "You can live on one," Black explains. After that kidney failed, Black underwent her second transplant in November, this time receiving two from an 8-month-old infant who had died. "Because they came from an 8-month old, they give both because they're so tiny," says Black.

She talks about how the baby's kidneys eventually will grow to adult size and that it's rare for surgeons to remove failed kidneys during a transplantation process. Then, she marvels about being blessed with not just a second chance at life but a third one, as well.

Black also confesses she feels a profound responsibility to be the best person she can possibly be, especially when she thinks about the infant donor and her sister, Bonnie.

"I want to make them proud. I want to transform as many lives as I can. I want to do as much good as I can do in this world," says Black, who lives in Howell with Leo Weisheit, her husband of two years and the man she calls her hero.

"He's the kindest, most special person I ever met," says Black, who got acquainted with Weisheit five years ago at a New Year's Eve party she almost blew off in favor of a night at home in her pajamas, watching the ball drop on TV. "I was always working, so I didn't have a big social life. I would fall asleep at my computer."

Black has devoted all those nights to her computer because of her commitment to trying to transform lives as founder and executive director of Friends' Health Connection, a New Brunswick nonprofit she began building while she was a student at Rutgers University.

Patient to patient
The award-winning organization today is recognized nationally and internationally for efforts to provide a patient-to-patient network of support for thousands of people who are matched according to their age, health problem and background. Black also has developed an educational component to Friends' Health Connection, devising and arranging workshops, conferences and lecture series in New Jersey and across the country, with a focus on health, wellness, inspiration and personal motivation.

"We´re known as being experts in identifying top speakers in health and wellness, and scheduling them for hospitals and nonprofits," Black says with pride.

"I start high and work my way down," she adds. "Starting small and working your way up, I think that takes forever."

This is the only job she´s ever had, outside of a six-week stint in the community relations department at Fox TV after graduating from Rutgers with a bachelor´s degree in communication in 1992. She quit after she realized it was too much to juggle the demands of the TV job while trying to grow the nonprofit.

She also believed her budding organization was her true calling. "This is my heart. My life has gone into doing this," she says. "It´s put purpose to my pain."

Black´s pain began when she was 15, during her freshman year at Atlantic City High School, when she was an enthusiastic member of the school´s rowing team. She and her mother, the late Frances Black, a registered nurse and art therapist, shared a row house in the Chelsea Heights section, "right on the bay, where the crew teams would pass by," Black recalls. "My mom would wave and they´d say, ´Hey, Miz B!´"

The diagnosis
She had enjoyed good health until the day she woke up with "the worst back pain. I felt like I couldn't move." That was followed by several days of chest pain that made it difficult to breathe. Then came the head-to-toe rash.

When her ankles suddenly swelled up, her doctor suspected she had lupus, an incurable, chronic, inflammatory disease that causes the immune system to attack vital organs and joints.

"It was devastating," Black recalls. "I had never heard the word `lupus.'"

After her diagnosis was confirmed, Black was plunged into intensive treatment that included steroid medication. She lost hair, became bloated and gained weight. She was forced to leave her beloved rowing team and had to miss weeks of school because of flare-ups from her disease that landed her in the hospital.

Because of the swelling, the only shoes she could wear were men's sneakers. Black rarely left home.

"One day, I was driving with my mom and I was in the back seat so no one would see me," says Black. "I was crying and I was asking, `Why me?'"

Her mother, with whom Black had always been very close, looked at her in the rearview mirror and suggested, "Maybe you got sick for a reason."

That was Black's "ah-ha!" moment. "That resonated with me. My attitude changed," says Black. "Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I thought, `What can I do to help others?'"

Much like `Miz B'
It was no surprise that Black took this empathetic approach to her illness, according to Kristine Robinson, Black's best friend since they met and started playing together when they were 12.

"Roxanne is so much like her mother. Her mom was a free spirit with a heart of gold, and that's exactly like Roxanne is," says Robinson. "When she was diagnosed, they took this and ran with it and kept it going. There were fun times to be had, and they were not going to let it take over."

Roxanne takes a stroll through her neighborhood.

Black had already displayed a flair for altruism before her illness surfaced. She would stand on the Atlantic City boardwalk, collecting change in a metal cup for the annual Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Once, when she was in grammar school, she won a trophy for raising the most money to benefit a multiple sclerosis read-a-thon.

After doing some checking around, she decided to form the Lupus Support Group of Atlantic County. "I kept saying, `Why me?' Starting the support group helped me to create an answer to that question."

She called the local library to ask for space to hold the first support group meeting. She contacted a newspaper and asked for a reporter to write about the group's formation. She approached a lupus specialist about giving a talk about the disease for whoever showed up. "I told him, `There's a chance there will be just you, me and Mom sitting there.'"

She held her breath. Twenty-five people came. "They all had lupus and they all lived in Atlantic County. I was so excited."

A unique situation
By the time Black was ready to graduate high school in 1988, the support group had a membership of 200. She also was well on her way to honing skills needed to successfully run a nonprofit organization.

"If you're standing in front of the person, eye to eye, it's hard for them to say no." Black learned this tactic as a high school junior, when her mom chauffeured her around to the business districts of neighboring Shore towns so she could ask merchants to donate items for an auction she was planning as a fundraiser for lupus research.

When she left Atlantic City for college, Black passed on the leadership of the support group while making plans to start another organization she called Long Distance Love.

She cared deeply about her fellow support group members, Black says, but she wasn't able to find someone from the group to talk to who understood her situation as a teenager dealing with lupus.

"There was no one my age. Lupus people tend to be women who were older than me. To be diagnosed at 15 is pretty unusual. Most of the women in the group were in their 40s or over. At meetings, they'd talk about the impact of lupus on their marriage, kids and careers," says Black. "I was trying to go to the prom when I was wearing men's sneakers, and I had lost most of my hair and I was bloated and feeling lousy. Teenagers are so about looks."

Her freshman year was fun -- she made plenty of friends in her dorm, but Black says she "couldn't find a teen" who shared her experiences with illness.

"I'd call different organizations for lupus and hospitals and say, `Do you have a teen I can talk to?' The hospitals had confidentiality rules. So I decided to start Long Distance Love."

She would later rename the group Friends' Health Connection because people would mistakenly get the idea Long Distance Love had romantic purposes. But Black's vision for her new group as a pen-pal network for people with similar health issues would remain the same as it is today.

"I was going to start this so that anyone, at any age, with any illness, can contact me to find a friend. I didn't want to limit it to lupus because other people with other illnesses are going through the same thing," Black says.

Seeking publicity for her cause, she wrote to reporters at major newspapers around the country, inviting them to do a story about her free service. She devised questionnaires for people to fill out so she could match them with, and give them an opportunity to write letters to, someone who closely shared their circumstances.

Mobile office
She turned her freshman dorm room, then her off-campus apartment, into the group's headquarters, inviting a willing army of student volunteers and her roommates to help her open letters, place phone calls and amass thousands of index cards bearing the names of people who needed a friend. "It was such a simple premise," recalls Black. "It was index cards, envelopes, stamps and volunteer time."

When she had her first kidney transplant in 1992, she moved her pen-pal network to her hospital room. Black did the same thing in November with her second transplant, taking along her cell phone and laptop computer.

"I'm surprised she didn't have the whole office in her room," jokes Nancy Proko, the national events manager for Friends' Health Connection. "She was out for quite a few months, but she was always connected. Nothing will stop her, not even a kidney transplant, from doing what she loves."

Meeting the right people
She also has gotten lucky.

"Throughout my life, the right person has stepped into my path at the exact time that I need their unique skills, guidance and gifts," Black says via a recent e-mail.

Among those people was Curtis Weeden, who was vice president of corporate contributions for Johnson & Johnson when Black met him while she was still in college. She credits Weeden with providing guidance and educating her about obtaining grants to fund her organization and the New Brunswick office where it's been headquartered for years. Today, Johnson & Johnson and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation continue to award significant grants to Friends' Health Connection.

Michael Bzdak, director of corporate contributions for Johnson & Johnson, remembers Black's compelling personality when Weeden asked him to help shepherd her first grant proposal. "She was a young woman you had to admire. She was very focused, passionate, and nothing was going to take her off her course," Bzdak says. "She believed in the project and would not stop until she realized it.

"She puts her personal challenges aside and thinks about everybody else," he adds. "Those people make this world a special place."

Additional Insight:Where she shops: Yard sales. Her decorating style: Homey-shabby chic How she relaxes: Makes crafts, something she picked up from her art-therapist mother. Keeps a "crafts room" in her house. Likes to make mosaics. How she relieves stress: Smashes dishes with a hammer to make tiles for her mosaic projects. "Breaking a dish is the most therapeutic thing there is." Management style: "From the bottom up. Those at the ground level are the eyes and ears for an organization or company. They're at the forefront. They can put out fires before they become fires."